“Meaning they started seeing each other?”
“If that’s what you want to call it. It didn’t last long. Maybe a couple of weeks. Long enough for her to get what she needed to make Finn jealous. She found him at a bar one night and told him about Jack. Threw it in his face from what I heard. Publicly. Eddy was there, and he said she came right over to Finn and lit into him.” He paused. “Finn left the bar with a bunch of his buddies and they went looking for Jack.” His voice grew quiet. “Beat the shit out of him. He couldn’t see out of his eye for weeks.”
He touched the place over his eye where Jack’s scar was. My eyes went wide.
“He told me he was on the boat when that happened.”
Boon bit his lip, let it go. “He was. That’s where they jumped him. Four of them. The defensive line, basically. When I found him, there was so much blood on the deck, I thought he was dead.”
I looked over to see if he was exaggerating, but his face was drawn, serious.
“Turns out the blood wasn’t all his. Four on one, and he managed to break Finn’s nose.” There was a hint of pride in his voice, but I saw from his face that he was bothered by the memory of it.
We sat in silence while I tried to wipe the image of Jack lying in a pool of blood from my mind. Jack hated to talk about his past, said the day his life really began was the day he met me. It used to drive me insane, the way he’d dodge my questions, kiss me to make me stop grilling him. But then we were married, and the years passed, and suddenly we had a history of our own.
I thought back to the night of the party. I heard Jack shouting, They’re not allowed to come over here again.
What he’d meant was you’re not allowed to bring my past back like this. You’re not allowed to do that.
“Why wouldn’t he have told me this?” I asked out loud, more to myself than to Boon. “It was so long ago. He couldn’t think I’d be upset over something as stupid as two guys fighting over a girl.”
Boon looked at me. Stared at me. Stared at me the way someone stares at you when they’re about to change your reality, your perception of things.
And suddenly I knew what it was. I don’t know how. Maybe it was Boon’s face, full of regret. I held up my hand so he wouldn’t say it out loud, and we sat in silence.
I blinked several times. I concentrated on breathing. I wondered how to ask Boon if there was a child out there that belonged to Jack that I didn’t know existed.
Instead I asked him if he’d fallen in love with her. This Hannah I’d never heard of before now.
“God, no. I think he just thought they’d fool around for a while. Then after Finn jumped him, Jack tried to break it off with her and she told him she was pregnant.”
“It was his?”
Boon turned to me. “Sort of a moot point.”
He paused, cleared his throat. “A couple of days later, she swallowed a bottle of her mother’s meds and chased them back with a fifth of vodka. Never woke up.”
There was a flipping sensation in my belly. I swallowed the hard lump that had formed in my throat. Swallowed again. I felt the tears well up behind my eyes.
“He kept all of this a secret from me,” I said, dumbfounded.
“That doesn’t surprise me.”
I shook my head. “Why?”
Boon sighed. “It really messed him up. Jack was always the straight-and-narrow guy. Only child, never knew his father, and his mother was always in one crisis or another with some guy. His grandfather was the only thing stable in his life. And he was always working on the boat. So that’s where Jack went. He was the same then as he is now. And you know how that is. He doesn’t talk about anything that bothers him. Took him over a year, drunk one night, to tell me he felt responsible. That it was his fault. That if he’d stayed away from her, none of it would have happened.”
“That’s a burden to carry all these years.”
Boon shrugged. “If you want my two cents, I think the reason he didn’t tell you has to do with forgiving.”
“I would have forgiven him. I didn’t even know him when this happened.”
“I wasn’t talking about you. I was talking about him,” Boon said. “I don’t think he’s forgiven himself. I’m not sure he knows how to.”
There was a long stretch of time we sat without talking. Then the nurse came to say Jack was out of recovery. She looked at me and said, you can see your husband now, and the first thing that came to mind was yes. Yes, I can. But was my husband ready to be seen?
?24
Kat
It turns out Smelliot isn’t so bad after all. I almost fell over when Mom said he was staying with us for a week. She was putting sheets covered with soccer balls on the bed in Maddie’s old room when she told me this, and I had to sit down on the edge of the bed and ask her what this meant. She couldn’t mean sleep at our house. As in use the toilet, eat at our table, wake up in our house. I told her this and made my eyes wide to show how awful that would be.
She waved her hand at me to stand up so she could tuck the sheet under the mattress and told me that, yes, staying with us did mean sleeping here, and eating here, and using the bathroom. And I was to be a perfect hostess. I shook my head at her and left the room. The only hostess I knew was the girl with the big fake smile who carried menus and brought us to the table whenever we went to the Wharf Rat, and if Mom thought I was going to smile like that the whole time Smelliot was here, then I had an even bigger problem.
My first thought was to go upstairs and stay with Grandma. Then I remembered Grandma was back in Florida. I’d tried to convince her to stay longer, even made her an ice-cream sundae with caramel sauce mixed with coconut flakes. But she reminded me that she’d already stayed extra long so she could help spread the rest of Maddie’s ashes. She said it was time she went home so Mom could get back to regular business. I asked her what regular business Mom had to get back to, and she looked over at me and said her life in a serious way, and since I wasn’t feeling all that serious, I shrugged and went back to eating my ice cream.